Time Out With The Rugrats Crew

November 19, 1998|By LISA SHRODER Staff Writer

Poor Chuckie Finster.

He's got this red hair that's waaaaay out of control. These two front teeth that stick out kinda funny. And these big square spectaculars -- er, spectacles -- that he needs to see the world. (Although the world can be a reaaaaally scary place sometimes and then he'd just as soon not see it.)

And now this. With the release of The Rugrats Movie on Friday, there's no hiding Chuckie's secret any longer.

Chuckie is really -- gasp! -- a woman.

It says so, right there on the credits: Christine Cavanaugh, voice of Chuckie Finster.

Of course, it's said so for seven years now on Rugrats, Nickelodeon's hit TV series (not that many people really read those final credits). But now there's no escaping the truth because Christine Cavanaugh is right here, on a sunny autumn morning, perched on a chair at Planet Hollywood in Fort Lauderdale. She and Mark Mothersbaugh, the man behind the music of Rugrats, are in town to promote The Rugrats Movie on a bit of a whirlwind visit that will take them next to Atlanta. And Cavanaugh is definitely not, for the record, a little red-haired boy. She is, in fact, an ultra-slim young woman who gives her age as "this side of 25" and wears pale lipstick, a short straight skirt and her long, honey-colored hair pulled back in a ponytail.

It's not much of a stretch to see her as Chuckie once you hear that voice, however. "I have a croaky voice to begin with," Cavanaugh says. Croaky? This is the voice of someone fighting a losing battle with laryngitis; think of sandpaper being drawn across coarse wood.

When she first auditioned for the part, Cavanaugh was given a picture and an outline of the character. "He's nerdish and he's kind of the fall guy and he needs to be a little inhibited," she says. "So I decided maybe he had adenoid troubles."

Which is to say that in addition to that hair, those teeth, those spectaculars (er, spectacles), Chuckie "has a drippy nose."

Originally from Utah, Cavanaugh started doing voices for student films through a friend who was an animator and artist at UCLA. In addition to the voice of Chuckie, she also was the voice of Babe, although she does not do the voice in the new movie, Babe: Pig in the City, which opens on Wednesday. She also has appeared (in the flesh, as opposed to voice only) in the movies Jerry Maguire and Soulmates, and on TV's Empty Nest, Wings, Cheers and The X-Files, among other shows.

Her favorite voice? This being a promotional tour, there's little question: Chuckie Finster, the little boy who sometimes lacks courage but who always has heart. The role she has had from the show's beginning.

"She's been one and a half actually it's 2] for a long time," observes Mothersbaugh wryly. "She can be Chuckie forever!"

Cavanaugh says she and the other actors typically put in about four hours per episode. "All of the babies are together in the recording booth," she says. She also does the voice for the Chuckie dolls that are part of the huge Rugrats merchandising push. "She's Chuckie everywhere," Mothersbaugh notes.

For the movie, which was in the works for three years, the actors spent just about a week taping, although they made fixes over a period of several months.

The plot of the movie: Tommy Pickles gets a baby brother named, appropriately, Dil, and the kids decide to take him back to the "hop-sickle." Along the way, they get lost, get scared and have a big adventure. "They're calling it Raiders of the Lost Ark meets the Rugrats," Cavanaugh says.

Which is exactly how Mothersbaugh scored the movie. Adults -- and some kids -- will recognize in the opening music "a parody of Raiders of the Lost Ark," says Mothersbaugh. They'll also recognize some voices in one scene that takes place in the hop-sickle: 1-day-old babies start singing, in essence, "How in the hell did we get here?" Mothersbaugh says. He brought in such artists as En Vogue, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Lou Rawls, Lisa Loeb and Jakob Dylan. "Everybody we called said they wanted to work onRugrats," Mothersbaugh says.

Undoubtedly part of the attraction was working with Mothersbaugh himself. He's the man who was behind the new wave rock group Devo, which became known in the '70s and '80s as much for its unconventional attire, like yellow jumpsuits and flowerpot hats, as for its music. You can see traces of that sense of humor in his clothing today: a big sweater covered in orange polka-dot patches and a pair of Elvis Costello style glasses in silver metal.

Mothersbaugh, who also has written music for PeeWee's Playhouse and Adventures in Wonderland, was brought in to score the TV show after the producers heard one of his albums and liked the childlike quality, he says. For his part, "what I like about this show is it's realistic," he says. "My first reaction was: Man, are these kids ugly. They're these bizarre protohumans; they're ugly and adorable at the same time."

Sort of like real kids, huh?

Neither Cavanaugh nor Mothersbaugh are parents themselves. But, Mothersbaugh says, he has plenty of nieces and nephews. And thanks to Rugrats, "I have credibility in my family now."

Given kids' huge loyalty to the characters, Mothersbaugh decided to have the actors sing most of the songs in the movie.

Including Cavanaugh?

"Chuckie does an excellent job of singing, Yo, Ho, Ho and a Bottle of Yum," he says.